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Ch. 11: Religion Is a Team Sport

#169: Dec. - Mar. 2020 & #109: Jul. - Sept. 2012 (Non-Fiction)
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DWill

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Re: Ch. 11: Religion Is a Team Sport

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The chapter title is from God Is Not Great. I don't know about the group cohesion factor of Eastern religion. One of the problems is deciding whether, if those religions don't bind quite as well as the Abrahamic ones, that is really such a bad thing. Using Haidt's mantra--morality (and religion) binds and blinds-- there's always a downside to that groupishness, so we're in trade-off land again. Some people, and I'm one of them, are going to feel more comfortable with less group emphasis anyway. Tribalism may be what got us to the point of creating our civilizations, but at this time it's possible that what we need is much less of it.

The example of Eastern religion is attractive, though. Maybe the attraction comes partly from unfamiliarity. I was reading in a museum about how the three great teachings--Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism--combined in China in no particular format to provide the people with a flexible system of belief and conduct, so that orthodoxy really couldn't exist. Yet that didn't prevent the Chinese from making great civilizations. The idea is appealing.

Haidt tells us in the book how he became a pluralist, which for him means accepting, and even welcoming, people with moral matrices different from his own. This is a difficult thing to do, since I think it's natural for each of us to want to see other people be more like us. If we think about it, though, we might see how that would have a bad effect overall. It might be more healthy to think well of people who think and behave differently from us. There might be a value in moral diversity similar to the value of biological diversity in a ecosystem.
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Re: Ch. 11: Religion Is a Team Sport

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Honestly, I didn't realize that we discussed this book eight years ago. It seems like just a few years back. It looks as though I agreed with Haidt's perspective on the purpose of religion and its importance in every human culture as a means of bonding. Conveniently enough, I still think he gets it pretty right. I had read three of the New Atheist books Haidt talks about (missing Dennett's), and though I found each well written and almost riveting, I also found the claim that religions have been the locus of most of our problems to ignore their ability to pull people together and manage social behavior, probably to a degree unsurpassed by other institutions (even football). That isn't necessarily to say that today they continue to be as vital in a democratic society, though Haidt cites research from Robert Putnam and David Campbell indicating that the quickened erosion of religion could deplete us of everyday philanthropists.

I'm curious about what Harry Marks thinks of the long-delayed definition of morality Haidt gives (p. 270) and the discussion that follows. How does Haidt do pairing this descriptive definition with normative theories such as Bentham's utilitarianism, to provide the aspect of morality that I think Harry thought Haidt had neglected?
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Re: Ch. 11: Religion Is a Team Sport

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DWill wrote:To fill out the narrative on religion used by the New Atheists: we have mental modules that have produced real benefits; they've contributed to our survival-- not just the supersensitive agency detection device, but possibly others such as a "gullible learning module" (Dawkins) or a module for falling in love. The incidental results of these modules have given us religion. We created gods because we saw agency everywhere; religions took advantage of our ability to fall in love to make us fall in love with God. No argument from Haidt this far, but he parts ways from them when they say that religion itself didn't benefit individuals or groups in terms of evolutionary or adaptive advantage. Haidt believes that "genes [were] selected because individuals or groups who were better at 'godding' outcompeted those who failed to produce, fear, or love their gods." So Haidt goes beyond those who argue that religions strengthened groups through cultural, but not genetic, evolution. Haidt also finds it extremely unlikely that "the genes for producing these various modules were all in place by the time modern humans left Africa," but that "the genes did not change in response to selection pressures either for or against religiosity during the 50,000 years since then."
Religion has undergone considerable cultural evolution that has little to do with the "agency detection" and "gullible learning" that so disturb the New Atheists. I appreciated this chapter very much, but felt that it just scratched the surface of the discussion. Surely we need to recognize that religion has generally influenced behavior, and in so doing may have succeeded in propagating itself by tapping into "groupishness". Leaving out the behavioral component leaves Dawkins, et al, looking biased, if not ignorant. But the appeal of religion is partly intellectual, giving us a narrative or worldview that makes sense of our urge to promote the divine (or the sacred, if you want a term that works in East Asia).

Furthermore its functionality leads to appropriation by power structures, as Marx observed. There is no question in my mind that Medieval Catholicism was shaped by the priorities of a power structure closely interwoven with the feudal structure of society. You can find the same thing in the Coptic Christianity of Ethiopia. There is little question in my mind that Lutheran schism was driven by German desire for independence from Rome, and Calvinism was driven by endorsement of the rising commercial class and its belief in its own value to society. Mormonism became a force largely because polygamy fit with the priorities of the frontier. One could go on.
DWill wrote:For Dawkins and Dennett, people and genes had little to do with the growth, or rather mutations, of religion. Religions are not composed of genes, but like genes they are "heritable, they mutate, and there is selection among these mutations." The selection isn't based, however, on advantages the host gets from the religions, but from the competition among the religious memes themselves, some of which happen to be better than others at lodging deep within the human mind and getting themselves passed on to the next generation of host minds. In the case of religious memes, the effect on the host is negative, but that is consistent with forms of life called parasites and viruses.
Whether or not it is a negative effect is open for debate. I think you have it right that the competition is for success at being replicated. Fox News is more successful as a worldview than MSNBC is, but not necessarily because it improves the lives of adherents. Such a comparison suggests we should always look at why a set of memes is successful and not just whether it is "correct." Haidt has made an effort to do so, while Hitchens, Dawkins et all have largely asked the oversimplified question why anyone would believe religious narratives rather than to simply accept what they are told by scientists. As if the whole matter recapitulates the intellectual journey they took, and there are no social influences on what we choose to believe. (I could give a number of counterexamples from the writings of Dawkins or Dennett - they are hardly exempt from motivated reasoning).
DWill wrote:It's important to make clear that throughout the book, Haidt generally doesn't use the words 'beneficial' or 'adaptive' in a normative sense. It might not be a 'good' thing, in our view or for other groups, that a group becomes more effective by exploiting religion. Haidt clearly marks the exceptions to this labeling practice, when occasionally he does venture to say that religion can be positive on the social level.
Sure, but for those of us living the religious life, intellectual appeal is part of why we choose to believe the way we do.

I smile crookedly when I hear someone refer to God as "Him" since I have gone to inclusive language churches for 40 years. That change was not a result of primordial lodging of murky and mysterious emotionality, it was a considered judgment on what we refer to when we talk about God and whether it makes sense for the referent to be male. It encompasses the ability to assess the symbolism we use to convey religious thought, which raises questions as to why we trust God and whether we think that makes sense for others.

"Positive on a social level" is a description not just of assessing the decision whether to trust God, but also of how we will choose to represent that trust, what filter we will use for biblical authority, and many other shaping choices.

Stepping back to reflect on the chapter, what else I think Haidt gets very right (besides the importance of considering the behavior engendered by the religious practice) is the importance of making sense of sacrifice. By casting the social contract in Locke-ian individualistic terms, we have prejudiced the discussion toward thinking that the common good should only appeal to us to the extent that it directly and materially benefits us.

A recent remark in a NY Times op-ed about Covid suggested that conservative "open up" arguments seemed to take the view that individuals are just parts in the economic machinery, and that we have no function higher than keeping the productive process going to avoid hurting the system. Well, that is part of the case Haidt makes: a religious mindset helps us view our contribution to others, and to social functioning, as a valid goal worth pursuing. I'm not saying that should inevitably lead to "open up" conclusions (for one thing, the owner class has a self-interest in wanting workers to sacrifice for the sake of the economy, since they don't have to be part of that sacrifice), but I am saying it is a bit weird (or WEIRD?) for a commentator to find an appeal to the greater common good as somehow illegitimate or ignorant.

It has helped me think about these matters, to be able to identify "sacred" appeal as distinct from "authority" appeal and "avoiding harm" appeal. I live with these all the time, and of course never really disentangled them except when a particular issue pits one appeal against another. It opens some lively lines of questioning. It also helps to have Haidt's views on why the distinct moral instincts were reinforced. Being able to think about the primitive sources of their appeal is helpful in assessing how we should re-imagine them in the present day.

I must say, though, that like many conservatives I think he gets the "free-riding" issue wrong. It is true that people can find themselves wandering into dependency because that is the slope of the land. In a village there is no great difficulty in perceiving such behavior and providing incentives to change, and in economy without great surpluses of output, the motivation is strong. But the truth is that we are long past the point at which we need to crack the whip to make sure everyone contributes. We are in a "Player Piano" economy, (again with the Vonnegut) in which the work of the headquarters people and the academic superstructure creates most of the value and the rest of us just accept whatever place the economy will deign to offer us. What is really difficult these days is to get into a job with a sense of meaning and real contribution. We could cut way down on the material rewards for such work and people would still scramble for it.

Sure, there is still a "free riding" detector module, and Murdoch's people play it like a fine violin. But the economics involved are far more complex than our stone age moral intuition can process. Which brings me to my last overall point: Haidt doesn't get to dodge the intellectual and cultural issues by appealing to evolution and instinct. I have made that point on nearly every post about this book, and I respect his occasional willingness to engage with it, but I am essentially arguing that what matters about these issues is mainly beyond the scope of the book.
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Re: Ch. 11: Religion Is a Team Sport

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DWill wrote:Honestly, I didn't realize that we discussed this book eight years ago. It seems like just a few years back. It looks as though I agreed with Haidt's perspective on the purpose of religion and its importance in every human culture as a means of bonding. Conveniently enough, I still think he gets it pretty right. I had read three of the New Atheist books Haidt talks about (missing Dennett's), and though I found each well written and almost riveting, I also found the claim that religions have been the locus of most of our problems to ignore their ability to pull people together and manage social behavior, probably to a degree unsurpassed by other institutions (even football). That isn't necessarily to say that today they continue to be as vital in a democratic society, though Haidt cites research from Robert Putnam and David Campbell indicating that the quickened erosion of religion could deplete us of everyday philanthropists.

I'm curious about what Harry Marks thinks of the long-delayed definition of morality Haidt gives (p. 270) and the discussion that follows. How does Haidt do pairing this descriptive definition with normative theories such as Bentham's utilitarianism, to provide the aspect of morality that I think Harry thought Haidt had neglected?
I don't find a lot to object to about Haidt's definition of moral systems, except that it is -etic rather than -emic, meaning that it addresses what these systems are doing as viewed from the outside without considering the meaning people find in them. To use his own analysis, this automatically demotes the dimension of honoring the sacred, since there is no sense that in promoting cooperation and suppressing self-interest people actually experience a more meaningful life. Such goals are worth honoring and supporting, so that life is not just one damned thing after another.

I think WEIRD people tend to be shy about discussing what makes life worth living. Maybe this is partly because the idea of the sacred presumes a kind of judgment on the aimless. I learned, 30 years ago, to think of aimlessness as a curse rather than mainly a moral failing. It is like depression or anxiety. The reluctance may also be because there are so many different sources of meaning in life that we resist a sort of "monotheistic" imperialism by particular concepts of the ultimate source of meaning. It doesn't need to be theistic - the sacredness of nature or the sacredness of family can thrive without any supernatural sanction.

Unfortunately we have much reason to believe that suppressing discussion of sacred values leads people to hide that very sacred status from themselves. So we get all kinds of judgment in modern society (not least of them being judgment against claims that values apply to everyone rather than being personal "choices") which then turns around and claims to be just personal and arbitrary choice. This is a deeply incoherent mode of thinking about life. It is valid to think of truth and understanding having a sacred status, for example, and the educated classes are quite willing to express contempt for ignorant opinions (I do it regularly), but to act as though this has nothing to do with shaping a common value system (and finding meaning in it) is self-deception as well as being self-isolating.

The question of how useful religion is to promoting social cohesion or "moral capital" in a secular age is a crucial one, and I don't think we have the answer. One must, I suppose, take a position of trust, but to be secular is always to hedge bets on which worldview will be the most fruitful and fulfilling. If that mainly works to give us a healthy appreciation for different views, then I think that can be really beneficial. If, instead, it mainly works to create Durkheim's "anomie" and be unwilling to make any commitments or trust any larger social principles, then obviously that would be devastating.
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